Obama speaks with leaders of France, Canada about Orlando

In the aftermath of the Orlando terrorist attack, President Obama says the US government is “doing everything in our power to stop these kinds of attacks”.

Obama is expected to address the shooting again Tuesday following a meeting of his National Security Council at the Treasury Department in Washington. “And no act of hate or terror will ever change who we are or the values that make us Americans”.

The Orlando attack has dominated news in Israel, which has seen a wave of Palestinian attacks in recent months.

A previous ban on assault weapons was in place for a decade, but lapsed under George W. Bush’s presidency. The shooter targeted a nightclub where people came together to be with friends, to dance and to sing, and to live.So, this is a sobering reminder that attacks on any American regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation is an attack on all of us and on the fundamental values of equality and dignity that define us as a country. “It’s time for them to step up to the plate and do their job”.

Speaking to reporters one day after the mass shooting, Obama said the United States was “going to have to make sure that we think about the risks we are willing to take by being so lax in how we make very powerful firearms available to people in this country”.

And Obama repeated his call for stronger gun safety legislation, saying the nation should focus on both combating terrorism and restricting easy access to guns. Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Women being empowered is threatening to them.

Though the USA has made countering extremist ideologies – especially online – a key component of its anti-IS strategy, the effectiveness of those efforts is called into doubt by continued attacks by people found later to have been inspired by IS from thousands of miles away. The FBI said Mateen pledged allegiance to the ISIS leader in 911 calls made during the killing spree – the worst mass shooting in USA history.

“It is, that if we have self-radicalized individuals in this country, then they are going to be very hard oftentimes to find ahead of time”, Obama said. “We have to go after these terrorist organizations and hit them hard, we have to counter extremism, but we also have to not make it easy for somebody who decides they want to harm the people in this country to be able to obtain weapons to get at them”.